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In Miscellany, March 19, this column sought information on an author called Shankar Ram. It was on behalf of Professor William Jackson of Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis, U.S.A. I now learn that Dr. Jackson is compiling an anthology of Shankar Ram’s work and is hoping to have it published this year.

Shankar Ram was the pen-name of T. L. Natesan (aka T.L. Natesiah) who did for life on the banks of the Kaveri River what R.K. Narayan did for Malgudi. Born circa 1896, Shankar Ram’s first collection of short stories was published in 1926 by A.N. Purnah’s in Madras. It was titled The Children of the Kaveri. Of it, it has been stated, “By natural talk and the slightest touches of description, the atmosphere of this old and changeless rural life is communicated.” And C.P. Ramaswami Aiyer, then the Advocate General of Madras, commended the “picturesque fidelity” of the stories. The slim book went into several editions and was last published again in 1941.

Two other books by Shankar Ram in English were published by A.N. Purnah’s. One was a collection of short stories, Creatures All, first published in 1932, and the other a novel, The Love of Dust, which came out in 1938. Another collection of Shankar Ram’s short stories is believed to have been published in 1966 by Gautama and Co., Madras. Sometime after this he passed away.

N. Dharmeshwaran who responded to Prof. Jackson’s original inquiry told him that Shankar Ram also wrote short stories in Tamil, which used to be published in Ananda Vikatan, and that Shankar Ram, whose mother tongue was Telugu, used to use a Telugu-Tamil lexicon when he wrote his stories in Tamil.

Prof. Jackson was in South India in 1970-71 and then again in 1980-82, the latter occasion being spent in the Kaveri Delta while doing his research for his Ph.D. on the saint-composer Thyagaraja. He discovered Shankar Ram’s work at that time and writes, “It was a happy find to come across an author who could spin tales about life in the part of South India I had come to love. It was of no concern to me that he had lived and died before I was even born.”

Describing Shankar Ram’s command of English as “excellent” and drawn to his style with its O. Henry twist in the storytelling, Jackson wants to share not only these aspects of Shankar Ram’s work but also “his soulful portrayals of the places and people” of that “fascinating region” nurtured by the Kaveri. To judge by Jackson’s admiration of Shankar Ram’s work, Jackson’s anthology is something to look forward to in the field of South Indian writing in English.

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